Mount Union borough

John Sweatlock of Mount Union and the Tobacco Bowl

John Sweatlock of Mount Union was chosen to captain the Muhlenberg College football team in the Tobacco Bowl, at Lexington, Kentucky, in December 1946. That same week his mother died. A letter the college sent out on December 20 said he lost her the Sunday before the game, went home, left for Kentucky the day of the funeral and "played a bang up game."

The Muhlenberg Weekly, the student paper, told its readers on December 12 that he would leave that day by train and join his teammates in Lexington. On Saturday, December 14, at Stoll Field, its lineup shows him at center, and Muhlenberg beat St. Bonaventure 26 to 25. The paper put the crowd at 3,000, after expecting about 20,000. The letter mentions a picture of him receiving the winner's trophy and calls it "a fitting climax to a wonderful football career."

The paper tied him to Mount Union more than once. In May 1947 it wrote, "He learned his football at Mt. Union, Pa., high school and learned it well," and in 1948 it called him "a Mount Union, Pennsylvania boy." In 1945 it named him as the son of Mrs. Madeline Sweatlock of Mt. Union, and the 1942 college yearbook lists him from Mount Union. His Find a Grave memorial says he was born in Mount Union and dates his birth to January 1920.

He had played center at Muhlenberg before the war. In a 26 to 6 win over Ursinus in the fall of 1941 he intercepted a pass at the Ursinus 30 and ran it back untouched for a touchdown, and Gettysburg College coach Hen Bream put him at center on his all-opponent team for that season. Then he left for the Navy. In September 1945 the Weekly reported that Aviation Machinist's Mate First Class John Sweatlock had served on the "flattop" U.S.S. Ticonderoga and had been in the battles of the China Sea and Okinawa. It said his ship was hit by two suicide planes and that he had been awarded seven battle stars and a Good Conduct Medal.

Back at Muhlenberg, he won the most valuable player award of the Downtown Quarterbacks club in the fall of 1946. In March 1947 the Weekly named him among seventeen Muhlenberg students in Who's Who Among Students in American Colleges and Universities. By October 1948 he was head football and wrestling coach at Ramsey High School in New Jersey. The biography on his memorial says he taught there and coached track as well, owned and ran a pier at Sea Isle City, New Jersey, for many years, and moved to Lehigh Acres, Florida, in the 1980s. He died there on August 25, 2005.

Checked against the record. We read the key pages of The Muhlenberg Weekly and the college's letter of December 20, 1946 as page images, and took the dates, the score and the lineup from them. The game account rests on the college's own paper and letter, not on a Lexington or Louisville newspaper, so the crowd of 3,000 is the student paper's figure. We read the yearbook entries as scanned text. Some details do not agree, and we do not choose between them. The December 12, 1946 Weekly calls him a senior from Hazleton with a home there, while its other issues and the 1942 yearbook tie him to Mount Union, and the 1948 yearbook lists Allentown. The letter's Sunday before the game and a Find a Grave date for his mother differ by a day. Two 1945 items disagree on when he enlisted or left campus, so no date is given. The 1945 paper placed the suicide plane hits at Okinawa, while a modern account of the ship places two such hits on January 21, 1945, during strikes on Formosa, so the story gives no place for them. Still open: a birth record, his Navy service record, the Ramsey school's own records, and his teaching and pier years, which rest only on his memorial's biography.

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